


follow, follow

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Pining, Soulmate Mishaps, Soulmates, exchangelock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-08 11:08:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1938627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a heartline in front of John Watson, footsteps for him to follow, and one day, they'll lead him to his soul mate. Invalidated from military service, he finally meets the man on the other end. Sherlock Holmes seems to have no such tie back to John Watson. John Watson wants him to choose him anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. follow your madman

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnonymousSong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousSong/gifts).



The footsteps start acting strange after he gets sent back to England.

It is not the first time; once, after uni, but before enlisting, there was a moment where they flickered brightly, letting him know there was some choice he was making, that would bring him to his soulmate.

Or away from it, as it turned out.

When he’d signed his enlistment, they’d dimmed right before his eyes. He’d felt a blank, hollow moment. “Oh,” he’d intoned, immediately feeling foolish for even entertaining the other as a serious option. He’d had this stupid hope… he was meant to do this, he knew that, to the roots of his hair. He’d thought maybe following his dream might also mean following his heartline.

“It happens to everyone, son,” his recruiter had said, clasping his shoulder in a sympathetic way. “You’ll come home and they’ll light right up and you can find her and settle down.”

It wasn’t like they were gone,  exactly. With the right focus, John could see them, but they were faint enough that they never caught his eyes, really. It was the same with most of his fellow soldiers. Once, one of the men in his charge, a newer recruit was on patrol and suddenly looked down.

He’d looked terrified. Found, and lost. “Uh, sir,” he’d said, in a thin voice. “Captain Watson.”

Of course, John couldn’t see the other man’s path -- but he had McNally from the beginning, his focus flickering down and his composure falling; the faint tremor down his spine. “Talk to me, McNally. Are we talking about a flicker?”

Tucker McNally’s adams apple visibly bobbed as he shook his head. “Landing strip, sir.”

“Shit.”

By then John Was old enough that McNally, at twenty two seemed like a child, even though John had to angle his chin up to look at him. Twenty two, all elbows and single eyebrow. “Go back to base, Private.”

Wide eyed, terrified, he turned on his heel. There wasn’t a lof of precedent for this, but John knew there would be no happy news if he let McNally follow the map in front of him. Finding your soulmate, on a patrol a hundred miles outside of war-torn Kandahar. “Private,” he said to his retreating back. “I’m sorry.”

When he realized he’d somehow turned twenty-five, and then thirty and never seen the footsteps ahead of him light up like a proximity warning, he remembered McNally’s face, ashen for weeks, and though it could be worse.

He imagined his soulmate sometimes, far away, but safe. In England, he supposed. She was five years younger than him, give or take, because that’s how old he’d been when they’d materialized. He imagined her sometimes, but not often. If he did, it would be impossible to reenlist. He was on his last tour, he’d decided. He’d lived his dream, become a man he was proud of. His dad would be proud of him. He could go home.

He came to that decision, and then a bullet went through his lower leg, shattering both bones into a jigsaw mess.

*

Back in London, crippled, finding the great shining love of his life was literally the last thing on his mind.

“Have you left the house since your last appointment, John?”

John gave an affirmative grunt.

“To anywhere but Tescos?”

John glared at her.

“I’m just saying, John. A lot of soldiers find purpose in looking for their mates. It help them adjust to civilian life,” Ella said.

John felt a surge of angry go through him, cold and stale like it was a dish that had been sitting out for days. He looked down at his useless leg, “I can barely get to the tube station without...” he said, pausing to grimace. “I’m not nineteen anymore.”

He’d walked ten miles, once, when he was twenty. Not because he’d really been ready to meet her, or vice versa -- she would have been only fifteen at the time, but because that was what you did when you were a lad. He’d followed the twists and turns until he’d been winded and laughing, and took a cab home.

“There is something we haven’t tried that I think would be beneficial, John, but you won’t like it.” Ella said.

“Don’t tell me, then,” he said, breathless. He rubbed at the swell of his chest with his palm to give himself relief.

“That’s it.” She gave a delicate nod to his hand. “I think adding a massage to your PT would help both, actually. Your lingering rib pain, and the other.”

“And the one I made up,” he spat.

“You should be gentle with yourself, John. Your body is confused. You lost a lot in the blast.” Ella’s office was decorated in taupe and blue, sterile right angles and romantic lighting. John hated the place immensely, and focused on it instead of what she was saying, because it was so, so much easier. He hardly heard her finish, because he was busy hating the clock, tick-tick-ticking out his last minute of his session: “but not everything,” she said, and she was so very wrong.

*

The funny (hollow, ironic, gallows humor, and not the delightful kind) thing about coming back to London in fewer pieces that he left was that his footprints hadn’t changed. It was strange, and terrible to be able to look down and see the same two footprints in front of him he always had, instead of one footprint and one peg.

It messed him up to glance down and see that, see that nothing had changed. Between the indents of both shoes ahead of him and the pain he still felt from nerve endings he no longer owned, he had to remind himself eight, ten, twelve times a day this is your life now.

The woman at the checkout counter punched in his bag of milk and tried to make small talk, and all he could think of was hello, John Watson at your service, sorry I’m only most of a man.

But, at heart, he was still a medical professional who respected other medical professionals, so at their next session, when Ella suggested he take walks, not for soul-searching purposes, but simply to vary his routine he started.

Which is when he ran into Mike.

At first he tries to avoid Mike, which works, until he calls out his full name and John is presented with the two unpleasant options of talking to a man who knew him as a robust, playful youth before he’s had a chance to perfect his gait and get rid of his cane, and on the other hand, looking like a total, complete tit.

“Ah. Hardly recognized you.”

“Understandable. I did get fat,” Mike grinned, because he was a genuinely nice man.

John, however, is a bitter husk, so he completely fails to say anything polite in response. They talk for a while over coffee. Past John’s initial humiliation, it is pleasant enough. Mike is jovial and talks over the awkward silences John keeps blithely starting. His mouth has been dry since e got back in the country, and he never seems to catch his breath.

Mike suggests he get a flatshare, and John frowns. “Who’d want me for a flatmate?”

“Huh,” Mike huffed.

John raises an inquisitive eyebrow, and Mike explained. “You’re the second person to tell me that today.”

Under them, the footprints before him flickered.

John had to swallow against bile in his throat. After a moment of deliberation, he said, “Who was the first?” and the glowing outline, flickered once more before solidifying in front of him in a cheerful right-this-way.

*

Every step John Watson had taken for thirty-five years had led him to whoever was on the other side of the door. The excitement clawing at his insides was almost painful in its intensity. Mike is ahead of him, but John can barely hear him over his own churning waterfall of nerve. Mike Stamford has a friend, a peculiar friend, and he’s going to introduce the two of them on the grounds that they are both completely unsuited for cohabitation. And unless there is someone else in there, this unlikable human is John’s soul mate.

He finally knows what Tucker McNally meant, now. The footsteps before him are landing strip luminous but he is careful not to look at them, because it feels so private. The thrum of being on the cusp of the rest of his life, the rest of his life with his soulmate, fills him from head to toe. He’d almost given up as his thirties came to a close and the footprints in front of him had never come to rest in front of another human being.

John was licking his lip in a twisting anticipation as Mike Stamford opened the door and stepping in confidently, completely unaware of the knots he is tied in: him, meeting his forever in such a debt. At heart, he’s still a soldier, he does hard things. The weaker man inside of him wants to run in the other direction to give himself a few more weeks, months, hell, a year.

*

“Here,” he said, chest ready to burst. Any minute now, the tall stranger leaning over his microscope was going to look at John, look down, and realize that he’d been waiting to meet him for most of his life. John knows exactly how old this man is, because he himself was four years old when his footprints appeared to lead him. “Use mine.”

“Old friend of mine, John Watson,” Mike Stamford says, leaving the other man to make his own introduction. Instead, he doesn’t even look up. The stranger holds out his hand, not sparing a single glance John’s way, as if he expects John to walk all the way up to him. Humiliatingly, he does. Making the other man come to him literally does not cross his mind, he simply walks feet careful on the pulsing outlines between point A and B, and presses his mobile into his warm hand.

The man sends a quick text before shoving it back towards him, propelling himself to his feet. He has striking features, cheeks broad and defined and slanted eyes wide set. John had always assumed his soul mate would be a woman, but he’s appreciated enough men in his day that he isn’t completely knocked on his arse by the revelation.

In the time it takes John to go through his briefly-started-and-quickly-thwarted crisis of sexuality, Mike’s friend -- his soulmate -- has time to give him a quick once over.

This is it. His gaze has gone all the way down, before coming back up. He has to have seen. John’s been waiting for this, not with single minded focus, because he’s enjoyed all of the moments that lead him here, school and military training and learning to unclasp a girl’s bra without making her laugh, but with more than a little anticipation. Instead of saying what he’s ready for (Would you like to grab a cup of coffee? Nice to meet you, I’ve been expecting you. Or even just a Hello.)  he says, “Afghanistan or Iraq?”

“Afghanistan,” John answers his bizarre question. And then, after a pause where the other man fails to explain, “How did you know about Afghanistan?”

Beneath his feet, the scant three steps between John and his soulmate are pulsing like a glowing heartbeat.

The man before him narrows his eyes, blue and green and someplace in between. “How do you feel about the violin?”

“I … it’s fine?”

“I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Will that bother you?”

“Pardon?”

“Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.”

John flings his focus at Mike Stamford, looking unassuming in the corner of the room. “Did you tell him about me?”

Mike smiles a bit as he shakes his head once, offering no answers.

“I told Mike just this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for, and here he is, just come from lunch with his recently invalidated old friend, back from the war. It was a simple enough jump. Anyway, I’ve got my eye on a nice place in central London, between the two of us we should be able to afford it. We’ll meet there tomorrow at seven.”

“That’s it?” John jokes weakly, relief flooding his system. Of course he realizes it. Perhaps he’s shy. John realizes he agrees, suddenly: the first conversation they have certainly doesn’t need an audience. “We’ve just met, and now we’re going to look at a flat? I don’t know anything about you --I don’t even know your name.”

“I know you’re an army doctor and you’ve recently been invalidated home from Afghanistan. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you, but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him. Possibly because he’s an alchoholic, but more likely because he just walked out on his partner for his soulmate, and I know that your therapist thinks your limp is psychosomatic, quite correctly, I’m afraid.”

“The name’s Sherlock Holmes,” he pronounces with a distinct purr, “And the address is 221b Baker Street.” He leaves John with a click of the tongue and a gaudy wink, and John’s footsteps follow him out the door. He watches them, feeling baffled and elated in equal measures.

*

He googles his name after he goes home. After a long walk with the uneven gait, a tripod of useless limb and metal, and John is sitting in front of his computer. Now that they’ve met, John finds some sense of ease inside himself: as if it were the decided that was the entire trial, and now is the calm.

Which is patently untrue, of course, but once he’s chosen his course of action, he seems to find that reservoir of calm, always. His hands are steadiest after he’s aimed at his goal. He types in his name slowly, almost savoring it, before pouring over his website.

“What an interesting man you are, Sherlock Holmes,” he says, touching his screen with his index finger.

*

He goes to meet Sherlock later that night at a place that John’s pension is probably going to cover about fifteen percent of. At the door, Sherlock informs him that the landlady has offered him a deal for ensuring her husband’s death. John stifles a laugh against his knuckles.  

He follows Sherlock Holmes upstairs thinking about how unlike anything he’d expected the other man is. Unlike anything he could have known to expect, from maverick detective to his damn voice, nevermind male.

“This could be very nice,” he tells him, as Sherlock Holmes is informing him that he went ahead and moved in.

“Oh,” John says, sorry for having embarrassed him. Sherlock goes to scoop up some of the miscellany as their potential future landlady settles in behind them. John’s just counting down the minutes until they can go somewhere and he can say, “Hello. I found you,” like he’s imagined since childhood.

“There’s another bedroom upstairs.” Mrs. Hudson says, “If you’ll be needing two, that is.”

John slides his eyes over to Sherlock, expecting to share a secret, sly look with him. Instead, Sherlock scowls. “Of course we’ll be needing two.”

John is not quite sure what to say, with Sherlock standing there, sneering at the assumption Mrs. Hudson has made that they’re together. “Yes,” John agrees into the following silence, trying to soften it. “We’ve only just met.”

Mrs. Hudson hovers in the wings, watching them, and nervous as John is, they seem to agree without saying it that they’ll both move in. John can hear her, just out of focus, making small clanking sounds in the kitchen.

Sherlock cracks open his computer. “I looked you up last night,” John admits with a sly smile.

“Anything interesting?”

“You said you could read a software designer by his tie and an airline captain by his left thumb,” John says.

“Yes,” Sherlock agrees in a low voice that coils around John’s stomach warmly. “And I can read your military career in your face and your leg and your brother’s drinking habits on your mobile phone.”

“How?” John asks, heart thumping, and the dread of being laid bare making his tongue heavy in his mouth.

Before Sherlock can answer, Mrs. Hudson mentions the serial suicides. Calls them right up Sherlock’s street. John is aware of them; he’d been cleaning his gun a week ago and thinking how would one even get in contact with a suicide club, in an abstract way.

“Three exactly the same,” she says.

“There’s been another.” Sherlock says, eyes out the window. “And something’s different.”

Police lights catch John’s eye from outside the window, and shortly after, a man in a suit crosses the threshold.

Sherlock doesn’t wait for him to say anything, or bother with introductions. “Where?”

“Brixton, Lauriston Gardens.”

“What’s new about this one? You wouldn’t come get me if there wasn’t something different.”

Their exchange happens quickly, but he says, “Will you come,” and Sherlock says he will, and as soon as he leaves, Sherlock is giddy as a child. John watches with a dry mouth as he excuses himself, tells John not to wait up (as if) and then, John is left alone with Mrs. Hudson, his heartline following faithfully, stretching out between them as if to let him know how easy it would be to follow him. John watches from his chair as the shoe-prints behind Sherlock follow him down the stairs.

And then, just as quickly as the thing is done, it is undone. “You’re a doctor. In fact, you’re an army doctor,” Sherlock says, popping back up from downstairs. “Any good?”

“Very good,” John says, because he is.

“Seen a lot of injuries then, violent deaths?”

John nods. “Enough for a lifetime.”

“Care to see some more?”

*

“You’ve got questions,” Sherlock says i the cab.

John has so many, but he’s beginning to appreciate the delicious edge of something big, so instead of going for the obvious, he says, “Where are we going?” and “Who are you? What do you do?” and finally, “How did you know about Afghanistan.”

He lays out the details like a man putting the finishing touches on a painting: his hair, his posture, his tan, and the imaginary pain in his shoulder by the fact that he has his cane in the wrong arm. And Harry, with the fact that her phone is so new, engraved from Clara and already she’s given it away. “It’s only been on the market for two months. What other circumstances could there be to leave your spouse on such short notice besides running into your soulmate. You disapprove: you’re a romantic.”

“And how did you know about the drinking?” John asks, not correcting him about Harry being his sister, because he’s got the other part right.

*

Sherlock asks him out to dinner, in the middle of a murder investigation. John’s life this week is shaping up to be something better than he’d ever expect in ways he didn’t even know he wanted. He’s met his soulmate’s arch-enemy. Said soulmate is a consulting detective. Here he is, somehow, with something he didn’t know to expect.

“I met someone,” John tells him, with wry amusement. “He called himself your arch enemy.”

“And?”

“People don’t have arch enemies.”

Sherlock frowns. “Don’t they? What do they have, then?”

“Friends. People they like, people they don’t like.” John says, with a voice heavy with hinting.

“Dull,” Sherlock says.

“Girlfriends,” John says, “Boyfriends. Soulmates.”

“Well, as I was saying, dull.” Sherlock says, and John’s heart slams painfully against his ribs.

“You don’t have a girlfriend, then,” he says, just to be sure. He has an awful moment: they’re both in their thirties. He can’t possibly fault Sherlock if he finds out now that at some point he gave up on waiting for John Watson and started a relationship with someone else. people do, of course, have relationships with people that aren’t their soul mates. Harry and Clara, to wit, weren’t soul mates, but they were lovely. He can’t even fault Harry for deciding to dissolve their marriage for hers -- it was only the abruptness that sat wrong under his skin.

“Girlfriend,” Sherlock drawls with a hint of disdain. “ Not really my area.”

“Boyfriend?” John presses. “Which is fine, by the way.”

“I know it’s fine.”

John’s mouth is dry. “So you’ve got a boyfriend, then?”

“No.” Sherlock isn’t giving him much to work with here.

“Right, okay. Good. You’re unattached, like me.”

Sherlock frowns for a long moment. “John, uhm. I think you should know, I’m flattered by your interest, but I consider myself married to my work.”  He gestures at the ground in front of him, awkwardly. “I don’t really… have a… or an interest in.”

John cuts him off before he can humiliate him into a smouldering pile of rubbish. “No, ah, I get it. It’s all… it’s all fine.”

There it is. They weren’t lingering together on the delicious edge, savoring the anticipation. There is a sadder truth, not completely unheard of. Sherlock Holmes is John Watson’s soul mate, but Sherlock’s heartline either does not exist or simply does not lead back to John Watson.

Well, shit. John downs his wine glass in a gulp, mourning the rest of his romantic life.

 


	2. follow your heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John is in love. He's trying to make this work.

In all reality, it is easier to settle into living with his soul mate, the one to whom he isn’t the soulmate of in return, than John had immediately assumed.

The night after John met Sherlock Holmes, he’d learned that as brilliant as he was, he needed someone to keep him from getting his bloody self killed. John Watson, soulmate or no soulmate had answered the call by following him into the empty education building, breaking down the door with a pair of well placed kicks to the side of the keyhole, the door’s weakest point.

John’s heartline left him an exact map to where Sherlock was holed up with Jefferson Hope, poison pill to his mouth. Hope seemed to be unarmed, but John had read the newspaper story: no signs of force on the body, which suggested to John blackmail or some other, more creative form of coercion. “Sherlock!” he shouted, crashing through the room and barreling straight into Hope with his (imagined) injured shoulder.

“And the cavalry has arrived,” Sherlock said dryly, but his mouth was curled into a grin.

“We’re you going to swallow that?” John demanded, sitting on a squirming killer’s chest.

“Of course not,” Sherlock scoffed, obviously lying his arse off.

Lestrade wasn’t too far behind -- following the GPS coordinates on Jennifer Wilson’s phone, and promptly cuffed a  still struggling Jefferson Hope. “You’re lucky John picked the right building,” Lestrade told Sherlock, and John tried not to wince. “The GPS only got us as far as the street.”

Jefferson Hope died in custody, with a ruptured aneurysm in his brain. Sherlock was massively distressed at not having a chance to interrogate him about his benefactor. John wrote about the whole thing in his blog. Ella was the first to comment. Nothing, eh?

*

For most of John’s formative years, he considered himself straight, with no also-rans. He lost his virginity at nineteen to a girl named Abby, who he’d been with for a year. She’d wanted to wait, because they weren’t soulmates, but eventually she’d simply come back from a Physics lecture and said, “John, let’s have sex,” the phrase was so incongruous with the way she looked so sweet with her round face framed by her french braid. He still felt a surge of attraction when he saw a woman’s hair like that.

After that, there had been an exception, a fellow uni rugby player named Benjamin, and John had amended his sexuality to straight-plus-Benjamin, and after that, was a brief attraction to Chris. For a while after that, he dated women exclusively. By that point though, he had experienced enough (mostly fleeting) attractions to men that he’d amended his view of himself to ‘bisexual’ rather than the string of “mostly-women-but” exceptions. As a sexuality, it was getting a tad long winded.

Now though, he felt as if his whole life had been in preparation to enter Sherlock’s life. Of course he’d had to join the army, of course his life had taken him through marksmanship and adrenaline addiction and the ability to patch up wounds using only dental floss or whatever was handy.

Sherlock Holmes was manic, in turns delirious with the thrill of solving the puzzles left for him by the criminals of London, and morose with the lethargy that came in between.

He’d told John that first day what he considered the worst parts. In truth, the fact that Sherlock played the violin at odd hours of the day and sometimes sunk into sulks that lasted for days were nearly the least of John worries.

If Sherlock had been honest about his deficiencies as a flatmate, it would have taken half an hour. He could have started with you will never be able to fully trust anything that comes from our fridge, no matter how often you bleach, and moved on to I refuse to do laundry, and sometimes I will forget to have my cleaning picked up and will steal your pants.

Also notable: the flat almost-always smelled like some experiment gone wrong, Sherlock talked over every movie John ever attempted to watch, drowning out important plot points by deriding the logistics of the last action stunt or inconsistancies of a foreigners accent, Sherlock often crowded into John’s space demanding he look at this, taste this, tell me what you detect, Sherlock rarely made any move to feed himself, or clean, or even keep his clutter from taking over their common living space, or John’s bedroom, because John had some free space on his bookshelf.

He might have said, although I am not interested in romance or sex, particularly with you, I will flounce about the flat in the nude, or mostly nude. I will not bother with towels for the most part, because I prefer to air dry leaving you in constant states of sexual frustration and annoyance, and also at some point you will probably look like a tit slipping on the wet kitchen floor.

He might even have mentioned the fact that the answer to the question “Sherlock, did you move my computer?” would almost invariably always be, “Your password was laughably easy, and mine was just out of reach, John, so I watched all of your pornography to have a good laugh, read through the drafts in your blog and...”

And it wouldn’t have stopped John from following him to the ends of the earth.

*

John knows Sherlock doesn’t  do sentiment, and claims he has no heartline. John is infinitely curious about that. He doesn’t believe that Sherlock doesn’t create emotional ties -- there is sometimes beer in the fridge for him and the fond way Sherlock calls him an idiot, and the way he fusses about Martha Hudson when her hip acts up (also the marijuana run in the rain, which John pretends not to know about) but he believes him about his heartline. Sherlock never glances down, as most people do every so often out of habit. John’s never really asked him though, what happened. Has Sherlock never had a soul mate? It seems unlikely that Sherlock has had even one relationship that has run its course, much less one with a soulmate. Although, come to think of it, the way Sherlock has closed himself off almost does scream widower.  

John takes special care to never let his heartline lead him to Sherlock. Sometimes, he takes a wrong turn when he loses Sherlock, not for long, but long enough that Sherlock, knower of everything, doesn’t mention his supernatural ability to follow in in a crowd.

*

If there were people more pathetic than John Watson, John was not aware of them.

He became more painful conscious of this with every passing month, living directly up the stairs from his soulmate. It was the worst at night, after he’d taken of his prosthetic and tried to get comfortable, his heartline illuminated the way under his door, and John stared at it, imagining it would be easy enough to follow it to the end.

In a different universe, where things worked out, he would follow it. Some nights, Sherlock started to play, and John made his way downstairs, content enough to let Sherlock think it had been his playing that woke him, because Sherlock seemed to react to guilt in strange, unpredictable ways. If John was ever going to get Sherlock to clean out the fridge or keep Sherlock off of his computer, he had to dose him with a little bit at a time, until it built up enough for a favour.

Sherlock didn’t even let his playing hiccup as John came down. “Tea?” John asked.

Sherlock didn’t look at him, but he also didn’t veer sharply from song to unpleasant sound category, so John went to making tea.

Sherlock’s music tonight was a bittersweet, slow and haunting but occasionally veering into more hopeful measure, John put his tea in front of him and sat down in his chair.

He sat with Sherlock, watching him intently until his concert came to a deliberate end. John tipped his mug up at Sherlock.

He didn’t respond, except to say, “You’re in your dressing gown.”

John touched the place where the skin of his thigh met his prosthetic, suddenly feeling like it might have been a mistake. “Er, yeah.”

Sherlock looked puzzled. “I’m glad you’ve moved past the illusion.”

John made a choked off sound, struggled to his feet.

“Oh stop,” Sherlock said with a wave of his hand, as if shooing away all of John’s silly sentiment like garden flies. “I simply meant, I’m glad you’re not operating as if it is a secret, anymore.”

Huh. Had John been treating his limb like a secret? Looking back, Sherlock hadn’t mentioned it, and he’d worn trousers and shoes or pajama bottoms and slippers when he was awake. Suddenly he wanted to laugh with the absurdness that he could have kept two massive secrets from his friend. Still, “Not good, Sherlock.”

“Is it?” he replied, unconcerned. “Mycroft essentially demanded I not mention it, but he’s been so wrong about every other instruction he’s had regarding you that I chose to disregard it as well.”

“Bloody Mycroft told you not to mention my leg?”

Sherlock inclined his head.

“When?”

“Ah, the night we met. Probably while you and Anthea were stopping by that depressing bedsit.”

John digested that for a minute. “And you listened to him?”

“Don’t think less of me,” Sherlock said, eyes twinkling. “It had been a while since the last time I decide to acquire a...”

After it became apparent that the conversation had rolled to a stop, John tentatively supplied: “A friend?”

“That.” Sherlock agreed.

“You asked your brother how to be my friend,” John grinned, stupid with a clumsy happiness expanding like a balloon in his chest.

Sherlock was scowling at the turn of phrase. “It was unsolicited information. And I hardly followed all of it -- for instance, I did not refrain from deducing you until I was certain you wouldn’t punch me.”

John sits with him, relaxed and warm from his tea, and Sherlock’s presence, and the pleasing knowledge that Sherlock Holmes listened to his brother, for him a near insurmountable task, o become John’s friend, the day he met him. He might not be Sherlock’s soul mate, but he’s not the only one that values his connection.

*

Six months after he and Sherlock meet, roughly ten months since John’s engaged in any sexual satisfying behaviors that don’t include his right hand, John’s libido lures him into a pub.

Besides that single facet, his life is perfect: he and his soulmate spend all of their time on honest-to-God adventures and his soulmate had been in his life about twenty four hours before he fixed John’s trick shoulder.

On the other hand: his poor cock has all but forgotten that there was a time before, where other people had occasionally paid attention to it.

John hasn’t really been on the pull in a long time, but its a simple enough thing. He situates himself at the bar with a pint, and then a second before he actually approaches someone.

Her name is Linda, polished nails and thick eyebrows, and she’s drinking her whiskey neat. “Hey soldier,” she says, mouth curled around a sultry smile.

“Actually,” he smiles, “I’m retired from that. Now I just solve crimes.” John’s been living with Sherlock too long to be impressed. And it’s not like he’s learned nothing in the past six months: he gives her a look from head to toe, and a glance at her bag, professional attire, expensive but understated purse, two phones on the top, an international watch but no other jewelry, running shoes.

“Stock trader?” he guesses.

She puts her finger on her nose. “Close,” she says, and summons the bartender for another drink. “So, crimes.”

It almost seems wrong to take his life with Sherlock and use it as a pick-up. “Crimes,” he agrees, but doesn’t elaborate. “Also medicine.”

“You’re having me on now,” Linda says, but she’s grinning. “Let me see your medical license.”

John pats down his trouser pockets. “Seems I’ve left it at home. Come on, I’ll show you,” he says, on instinct, because a life time of dating and smiling at women and using the right cadence to amuse potential partners is easy to fall back on, but John immediately regrets inviting Linda back to 221b.

He’s almost relieved when she laughs. “Did that seem smoother in your head?”

In the end, they go to hers, and just as John is wondering how long he needs to stay before he can extricate himself, Linda says, “Oh. Uh, are you trying to stay? I don’t mean to be tactless, but I’ve got an early morning.”

And John cheerfully extricates himself back into London, and takes a cab to Baker Street, feeling relaxed from orgasm and the sudden relief of being able to leave with no guilt. His high spirits last until he crosses the threshold of their living room, where Sherlock is perched in his own armchair, hunched and unrested.

“Hey,” John says in a low voice.

Sherlock refuses to look at him, and John moves towards him, picking up the mug on the table beside him. He gives it a sniff. “Just the way you like it, cold and stewed,” John attempts to joke. “Shall I make you another?”

“What you do with your time is of no consequence to me,” Sherlock shrugs. John immediately recoils at the tone.

You’re the one, he thinks. Married to your work. No soul mate. Not your area.

John sets down the mug. “I see you’re in a mood.”

“Life is tedious, John. There is nothing quite so intolerable as being alive.”

Mycroft let something slip, once. John eases himself into his own armchair, by now paying very little mind to his non-organic leg. “To live would be an awfully big adventure.”

Sherlock keeps staring ahead with feigned disdain, but somehow, rippling beneath the surface like a river-rock, there is faint amusement. The tension starts to drain out of him.

John puts the telly on.

*

John repeats his outing, for science. Less pub, more dinner-with-women-he-meets-in-broad-daylight. He may not be Sherlock’s heartline, but if he’s going to be miserable every time John goes out for a shag, John may have to choose.

John makes a point to tell Sherlock when he’s leaving, and where he’ll be, three times.

Three times, Sherlock calls relentlessly, invents new cases, and on the third, Sherlock physically shows up.

“What was that about?” John bites out, to keep secret the fact that his insides are set at a slow simmer, every internal organ demanding the same answer: what does it mean?

“Oh, come off it,” Sherlock grins. “You were drowning in the normalcy of it all. You practically begged me to rescue you.”

“I did no such thing,” John pretends to fume.

“You left a note on the fridge.” Sherlock points out.

John files the incident away, and goes back to his daily masturbation routine.

*

“If I have to look at painted mannequin with an upside down face,” John grumbles, shoving both hands into his coat pockets. The venue is like a frozen warehouse. Uni students are milling about rubbing their hands together and sipping from the provided free wine and their own hip flasks. John abandons his first threat, and instead finishes lamely. “I hate modern art.”

“You’re not supposed to be appreciating art, John,” Sherlock replies, out of the corner of his mouth, eyes in the corner of the building.

“You said I was supposed to look for suspicious recurring themes,” John reminded, leaining in close to lower his voice. Sherlock had to lean in, too, and John could feel the little huffs of his breath tickling through the hair at the top of his head. “You said the students were using the monthly exhibition night to pass back and forth coded messages.”

“Ah. I forgot.” Realization dawns on John as he watches Sherlock’s face.

“You tit,” John accuses, discreetly elbowing him in the ribs.

“You’re a terrible liar, John,” Sherlock says, trying not to smile and John narrows his eyes at him. “I needed you to look natural.”

“You bastard,” John said between his teeth, and a woman nearby is gives them the side eye.

Sherlock, tactless specimen that his is, glares right back at her, and does something strange. John doesn’t have time to think; suddenly he is tucked warmly against Sherlock’s front. “I’m sorry,” Sherlock says, his voice low and sultry. It wraps around his stomach in a loose coil, “we keep getting suspicious glances. Probably due to your obvious boredom. I’m obviously the art aficionado, promising to adequately attend to your sexual needs right now.”

Sherlock releases him and goes back to surveying the crowd, and John is left to try to keep his cock, as eager as it ever was as a lad after so long without another warm body pressed against it.

*

The case with the uni students trafficking drugs at art shows turns far more sinister, and ends with a bullet through Sherlock's torso, below his heart, and John kills the man at the other end of the pistol before he even has time to think about it. 

"Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock," he says, pressing down to staunch the bloodflow. The paramedics arrive at roughly the same time the met does, and it's not Lestrade that arrives, John's illegal handgun three feet from where he's applying pressure to Sherlock's chest. He can't hear anything but his own heartbeat as he roars at the DI trying to pull him off of Sherlock. He clips him in the side of the head, and it takes two men to get him into the car. Sherlock's not conscious but John is shouting to him anyway. There is a dead man fifteen feet from him. 

They seem to forget about him in his holding cell, and no amount of screaming, pleading, or name-dropping has brought anyone in. 

After an hour he gives up to stare resolutely at his heartline. As long as it's there, John can survive this, he's already survived so much. He's been legally dead before: so long as Sherlock is still breathing, they will make it through this. If John had to carry him everywhere they went for the rest of his life, or extract his own vital organs for him, so long as he has a pulse...

It becomes a mantra, until, for a horrifying moment that stretches on into permanence, his heartline lights go out until, for the first time in his life, there isn't a single footstep in front of him. The anguished cry he makes is so loud in his own cell that he surprises even himself. After a long time (hours? months? Sherlock Holmes is dead and the world has stopped spinning,) long enough that John's vomit in the corned of the room has dried, an officer hands him a cell phone.

"I can't," John gasps, knowing who'd be on the other end of the call. "He's dead, Mycroft."

"Sherlock," Mycroft says, his voice angled away from the phone. "John Watson is quite convinced that you are dead. Do you have any theories about that?"

 


	3. maybe he's doing the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late wrap up! Thanks everyone for being so gracious with me!

Relief fills John’s mouth with saliva.

“He’s alive? He’s okay?”

“For a given value,” Mycroft agrees, voice somber, “I suspect he will pull through.”

His knees give out beneath him in sheer relief. The concrete beneath him sends a jolt from his tailbone to the top of his spine, and he ground his knuckles into his hot eyelids, tight with dried tears. “Can I...”

“He’s not actually awake,” Mycroft says.

“Damn it, Holmes,” John growls. He’s gone through the wringer for hours, he does not have the energy for this. “What was that about? And why am I still here?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Watson. I had been preoccupied with the near-death of my only living sibling. The fact that you chinned numerous officers of the Met in a rabid attempt to get to him, and that you’d obviously just killed a man certainly didn’t help to get you processed any faster.”

Which took the wind right out of John’s sails, but beneath that was the hot simmer of something else in his blood. He could feel it in the soles of his feet, and the back of his neck, Sherlock alive, Sherlock breathing.  

*

He meant to tell Sherlock.

Sherlock had died and the world lurched beneath John’s feet, and for several terrible hours John had cried and kicked out with boneless legs in impotent anger at himself, that he’d let the world burn down without telling it it had been brilliant.

But then he’d gone back, collected from the station by one of Mycroft’s endless black cars, and sat sentry all night waiting for Sherlock to wake up. Feeling, like a great arrogant tit, that so long as there was someone to listen to the rhythmic chirping of his heart monitor, it couldn’t possibly stop.

“Juh,” Sherlock rasps, well after the sun came up the next morning. John had taken to blinking in five second stretches and jolting back to top-tier awareness every few minutes. He does one such jolt now, lurched from his micro nap back into consciousness to see Sherlock, one eye cracked.  

“I’m here,” John says, and Sherlock’s pale hand pushes himself from under his sheet. It flops uselessly, dangling beside the bed as Sherlock makes a small groan, like a door on a hinge. It only takes John a moment of indecision before he takes it in both of his own.

Sherlock’s puckered forehead relaxed like cotton under an iron. He didn’t stay awake for long.

In the morning, John’s neck is stiff and Sherlock looks less like he’s made of wax. He’s breathing deeply with his eyes closed.

“You’re not sleeping,” John says. He isn’t sure if he has or not -- the night is a blur of painful dragging moments and feverish anxiety. Likely he dozed at points.  

The corners of Sherlock’s mouth tilt down, but he doesn’t open his eyes.

“Greg left a dozen texts.”

After a moment of no response, John goes on. “You’re going to be fine. The bastard put a hole in an impressive list of internal organs, but.”

“But the good doctor put a hole in his...” Sherlock took a pause to pant, before swallowing.

“Yes,” John grimaces. “There was that.”

Sherlock gave his hand a limp squeeze, and John looked down with the dull surprise that he’s still holding it.

*

Sherlock heals in fits.

Of course, he doesn’t get nearly his doctor’s recommended level of bed-rest. John passes by a lot of moments where he thinks: this is the time to tell him.

Sherlock takes over the entire floor of their flat for recuperating entertainment. John has not seen him with so many experiments and miscellaneous junk out at once, ever. There are dollhouse models of old crimes on the table and various sound-proofing materials and gravel and shotgun shells on the ground.

“You’ve got twenty-five tabs open on two computers, Jeremy Kyle on the telly, and nine different projects out,” John points out, when Sherlock grows listless and techy.

“Ten,” Sherlock tells him, viciously stabbing a watermelon with a small knife. “The moss and the algae in the sink are entirely different. They’re on different sides for a reason, John. It’s a wonder you can mate your own socks.”

Sherlock has been on edge for days, but this is the first time he's directed his ire John's way since he left the hospital.

“Come over here, please,” John says calmly from the couch, unperturbed by Sherlock’s rudeness.

Sherlock, after glaring at him for some time, stiffly walks over to the couch and sits down.

“Do you want to breathe with me?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Could you reach any new levels of pedantic?”

“Probably,” John says, putting a hand across Sherlock’s eyes, and then starts a slow count.

Sherlock huffs, but then structures his breathing to John’s counts. Instead of keeping it even and rhythmic, John alters the timing to be sporadic but slow.

After a while, Sherlock slumps against him, heavy at his shoulder.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Like my brain has too many tabs open, and my body is itchy.”

“Close all of them,” John suggests, moving his hands to wrap around Sherlock’s arm. He pulls him tight against him, shoulder to shoulder. “Do you want me to read you a cold case? Lestrade brought some by while you were napping.”

Sherlock shook his head. “No. But I could tell you about one I’m having trouble thinking through.”

Sherlock talks until he rasps, finally softening some of his agitated edges, and John thinks don’t we have something worthwhile?

*

Sherlock’s bullet hole heals.

His first case back is a quick one: a string of identity theft targets turn out to all be sex workers, which had intregued Sherlock for about the three and a half seconds it took him to the heart of it and accuse their pimp.

There is no chase to round out the day, no bullets, no one to kidnap John, no need for Sherlock to have to whip out his knowledge of different type of dust.

But John squeezes his shoulder regardless. “Amazing,” he says, massaging the tense cord of muscle tight between his shoulder and the nape of his neck.

“Hardly,” Sherlock scoffs. “Mindless criminals don’t even have the decency to steal the identites of another pimp’s employees to throw us off the scent.”

John tries not to laugh. “There’s always Christmas.”

*

John studiously avoids looking at the ground. His instinct is to stare, like worrying a loose tooth with his tongue, because he’s never had a blank expanse before him. He doesn’t know what that means. Is Sherlock no longer his soulmate, or does it just not understand that Sherlock’s still alive? John hasn’t met many widows, but he knows that there’s usually someone else, at some point.

He’s not sure if he wants that to happen. It might be simpler, in some ways, to move on from this unhealthy pining for his flatmate, start over with someone capable or interested in reciprocating.

But. He’s not sure that he wants that. He may not be Sherlock Holmes’ soul mate, but he’s important to him. Maybe not in the same way, exactly, but besides sex, and affection, the spectrum of touch, John has everything he needs in 221b.

He keeps glaring at the floor, feeling as if he can keep a new set of footsteps from emerging from the sheer force of his resistance.

Apparently, John isn’t as effective in not looking at his lack of heart line as he was not looking at it when it lead to Sherlock, because unlike his constant knowledge of Sherlock-as-his-soul mate, Sherlock sees fit to mention it.

“She’ll be back in country soon enough, John, you don’t have to obsess over it.”

“Pardon?”

Sherlock sighs the way he does when he feels like he is the only human in a hundred mile radius capable of having a complete thought. “All week, you’ve been looking at your heart line an average of twice as often as when we met, and looking away within a second, looking perturbed. Prior to that, you’d stop wandering off and going on dates for quite some time, indicating that there was almost no chance of meeting her, pushing thoughts of both meeting your soul mate and interim romance to the back of your thoughts.”

John waits out his stream of speech, feeling like he’s standing in the curl of a wave, his heart smashing painfully in his chest. “Are you done?” John asks.

“No,” Sherlock says, petulantly.

“I think you are,” John disagrees. “And I don’t care about any of that nonsense,” he said, waving vaguely at the ground before him. Let Sherlock puzzle out what he meant, like he’d done to John all those months ago. The mad man had become his best mate in the space between then and now and John was still no closer to answering the mystery of Sherlock’s heart line.

“What,” Sherlock says, flatly.

“Exactly what I meant,” John says, shrugging with a bravado painted on like the face of a china doll. “We’ve got a good thing going, you and I, without any sentiment getting in the way.”

“Exactly,” Sherlock agrees, frowning.

They stand in the living room awkwardly for a while, Sherlock in his purple shirt, straining at the buttons and the lines of his neck taut. “I,” John says, mouth dry. Under his shirt, Sherlock has a healed-over bullet wound that still itches, and it is now stunningly clear that he didn’t immediately look at John and deduce amputee, afghanistan, one-way soul mate like John had always assumed, “might as well hit the hay. I’m knackered.”

It isn’t the elephant in the room for both of them. It is only John’s elephant. He needs to retreat to think about this.

“Wait.” Sherlock says, reaching out to clutch at the sleeve of John’s dressing gown.

“I know there’s someone else. At any moment she could get on a plain and be back on the continent and you could -- you could take a cab fifty kilometers and find her, but.” Sherlock says, voice cracking somewhere in the middle. “You said it yourself -- we have a good thing going.”

“What are you trying to say, Sherlock?” John asks, hope ricocheting around his body like shrapnel, destructive and far reaching.

John can see the tremor in Sherlock’s throat as his adams apple twitches up and down. “I’m saying. I know I’m not the one the universe chose for you, but… choose me.”

*

John’s thought process goes crashing off-rails, for a dizzying moment his vision starts to blur at the edges. He moves into Sherlock’s personal space, planting both feet between Sherlock’s, standing eye-to-chin with him. “You idiot,” he says, and Sherlock winces deeply, opening his mouth to issue apologies, but John puts his hand on the collar of his shirt, enough to ground him, but not actually touching any skin. “Isn’t it obvious I already have?”

He moves slowly, enough that Sherlock has the time to jerk out of the way, as he puts one hand on the back of Sherlock’s neck and reels him in, directing his face closer to John’s.

“No,” Sherlock says.

John moves his face back a few inches, far enough to see his expression clearly. “No? Please get out of my personal space, no? Or...”

“No, it wasn’t obvious,” Sherlock huffs.

“Oh. In that case,” John says, and pulls him down much more quickly this time, leaning in and hovering a millimeter from Sherlock’s mouth with the curl of a smirk threatening to unfurl until Sherlock smashed his mouth against John’s clumsy and sweet and petulant all at once.

When Sherlock pulled away, he was grinning, red mouth wet and tempting. John stole another rapid smack of a kiss before he stood back. “I thought this business wasn’t your area?”

Sherlock frowned. “Seven billion people, more or less, and after my soul mate died, there was no one else. I’m apparently so singular that there was no second option. I didn’t know I’d meet a John Watson.”

John left his hand curled around Sherlock. “Did you know him?” John asks, before catching himself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume.”

“I assume the same,” Sherlock says with a shrug. “It must have been a he. He passed away when I was only fifteen.”

The impact of what Sherlock says makes him take a step back. “He would have been nineteen,” John says, not meeting Sherlock’s eyes. “Maybe a bee sting. Maybe your soul mate’s allergic to bees. And it took a long time for someone to find his epi pen.”

Sherlock’s eyes are huge, and John feels a jab of adrenaline along with everything else at figuring out a puzzle before Sherlock Holmes for once in his life.

“You would have been nineteen,” Sherlock says, so far away, one foot in his mind palace. John’s known him long enough, he can see it: Sherlock combing through every interaction they’ve had since they met. Of course, now Sherlock realizes why he’s been looking at the floor, and how they now have the shared experience of having had a soul mate’s heart stop long enough for a soul line to fade, but not long enough for death to be fatal.

He knows they both have no soul lines now, but against all odd, have found their soul mates regardless. What a world. John looks down at the empty space between them on the ground, with no footsteps. It already seems less hateful.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sherlock scowls.

“I thought I was obvious enough,” John grins. “I agreed to move in with you after one day. You’re the one that cut me off at the pass at Angelo’s. I figured it just didn’t go both ways.”

“John, I started labeling the contents of the fridge for you.”

“As far as declarations go,” John muses, “I suppose in retrospect it’s very … you.”

*

Somehow they end up back on the sofa. John shucks his dressing gown fairly quickly, leaving him in a plain navy t-shirt and his trousers, hovering above Sherlock, who somehow ends up on his back across the body of the sofa. The whole thing is very mysterious, shrouded by a fog.

John supports himself on his knees, both framing Sherlock to the side of his hips, and his palms, flat by Sherlock’s face. He leans down to kiss him, teasingly, sweet and coy, and it feels like getting something he’d resigned himself to never having. Every time John moves away from Sherlock, he follows him up, neck straining, with a silly little hopeful noise.

John pets his sides and nuzzles into his neck.

“Sherlock,” he murmurs, and beneath him, when he finally gives in to Sherlock’s little surprised, needy noises and lets his body settle against him, he can tell he’s so overheated. He threads his hands through his curls, kisses the crest of each cheekbone. “I’m so glad.”

Sherlock beneath him is hard, squirming and looking more flustered and adorable than any grown man has a right to be. “Yes, John,” Sherlock agrees, and pulls on John’s bum with his hands, still in his denims, and brings them flush together.

“Oh,” Sherlock says.

“Forgot about that?” John winces. “Sorry.”

“You do not apologize for your body,” Sherlock scowls, vicious.

John touches his face until he calms. “I meant, that you got pinched by it, you dolt.”

Something seems to occur to Sherlock, because his face lights up with the unholy glee of his scientific curiosity as he struggles to prop himself up. John is foced to sit up to give him the room to do so. “When you still had a heart line--” he asks, voice sliding into a slight lisp as it does when he gets too excited to exert perfect control over his transport.

John rolls his eyes. “Yes, I saw two footprints. No, I don’t know why.”

“I’m going to have to make a study,” Sherlock beams, and then relaxes back into the couch. “Now back to the task at hand.”

John is only too happy to oblige. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading and sticking with me. I wrote a while ago about how there's a massive disparity between people who hit the button for "this might go in a interesting direction... people send me an email alert when this updates" and people who left a kudo. I hypothesized that it was because maybe some of you didn't want to commit until you knew it would be a happy ending for our lovebirds. I hope that was the case! ;) Let me know what you think, or come hang out with me on tumblr, where I'm [katiewont](katiewont.tumblr.com). Smooches. ;)

**Author's Note:**

> Glorious art by [Oswaldz](http://oswaldz.tumblr.com/). 


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